On Tuesday, IBM announced the successor to Watson: WatsonX, an all-in-one artificial intelligence (AI) building tool for enterprises. This upgraded version is very fitting as Watson was originally launched and marketed to beat humans at the “Jeopardy!” game show years ago. Now, however, AI is being used to complement humans and help them to enhance their own capabilities within the workforce.
Why it matters: IBM’s new offering of WatsonX indicates a significant strategy shift as they work to gain a stronghold in the marketplace for user-friendly platforms for companies searching to introduce AI into their business models. The influx of new AI tools and technologies has created a lot of demand for organizations, but there’s still a significant shortage of human talent within the current AI market. That’s where tools like WatsonX come in.
- IBM is pairing up with HuggingFace, the AI startup and open-source platform that reached a $2 billion valuation last year to develop new offerings.
- “We allow an enterprise to use their own code to adapt the model to how they want to run their playbooks and their code,” CEO Arvind Krishna said. “Then they can deploy it for themselves without any danger of their code leaking.” Other areas the AI tools will be deployed include cybersecurity, customer care, parts of supply chain and IT operations, and customer care.
- The new WatsonX platform will be widely available in the third quarter, although the company boasts a current client list of NASA, SAP, PyTorch and Wix already.
